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Until recently, I've always been an off-the-rack, grab-and-go, non-DIY kind of person. With two kids, a job and a full slate of activities, I didn't think I had the time to dabble in household remedies.

The tipping point came after I spent $300 to have an exterminator spray toxic chemicals around my house and yard – twice – with little to no effect on the fleas.

Desperate for a solution, I turned to the Web, and after much scratching and surfing, I found a tip that advised pouring salt (or baking soda) over dog and human bedding, floors and upholstery and rubbing it in to dry out bugs and eggs.

All I had to do was let it sit for much of the day and then vacuum, with a follow-up two weeks later to get anything that actually hatched.

It was messy, but it worked. Best of all, it was nontoxic and only cost a little over $10 for salt and baking soda. (I used both.)

That got me thinking: What other cheap household remedies were just as good, if not better, than commercial products? I perused dozens of home blogs for answers. Here are a few of the MacGyver-like recommendations for homemade products I found:

Best stain fighter ever. I can vouch for this one – also featured on the website ModernDayMoms.com: Mix one part Dawn dishwashing liquid with two parts hydrogen peroxide. Rub and rinse. This solution even gets out oil and red wine stains that commercial stain fighters can't touch. Moreover, in my research, I found that the same dishwashing liquid could be poured into plastic bags in the freezer to make gel cold packs for injuries. Who knew?

Delicious DIY cough syrup. One word: Honey. A University of Pennsylvania study found that honey was more effective in reducing coughing symptoms in kids (as rated by parents) than traditional commercial cough syrups, according to Lifehacker.com. It's cheaper and a whole lot easier to get a kid to eat honey than Robitussin.

DIY laundry detergent. The Web has many recipes for make-it-yourself laundry detergent. For her version, Josie Kapetsonis, who blogs about couponing on SouthernCalisaver.com, uses a bar of Fels-Naptha soap, borax and a box of washing soda, which can be found in grocery stores, craft and dollar stores.

Kapetsonis prefers this low-sudsing recipe to commercial products such as Tide. She says it does a better job of cleaning the food smells and oil stains out of her chef husband's work coats.

Her husband, she says, prefers the more heavily scented commercial laundry detergents. But, the cost savings is hard to argue with. For less than $5 she can make almost four months' worth of detergent that works well in her high-efficiency machine. Compare that with the $12 you'd pay for a 64-load bottle of Tide at Target, and going DIY starts to make more sense.

“I like the DIY stuff,” Kapetsonis says, adding that she has since gone on to make her own homemade version of Febreze to spray on her furniture, as well as her own version of Starbucks Frappucinos.

The bottom line, says Sarah Aguirre, About.com's housekeeping expert, and a handful of other environmental bloggers, is you can fix or clean almost anything in your house with a handful of cheap natural products, including:

Baking soda. It makes a good counter scrub, bug repellant, deodorizer, toilet cleaner, toothpaste substitute, itchy skin reliever and stain remover. I can vouch for its value as a facial scrub when mixed with a little water. So can the esthetician who told me about it.

Lemons. In addition to being a fabulous addition to drinks and recipes, they're also a great furniture polish when their juice is added in a 1:2 ratio to olive oil. Lemons can remove stains from grout and plastic storage containers, clean tarnish from copper pots, clean laminate counters and cutting boards, get rust out of elbows and soften dry patches on skin.

Personally, I would add olive oil to the list – it's a great all-around hair and body moisturizer and makes great salad dressing.

What are your most effective, inexpensive home remedies? Send your tips to moneymatters @ocregister.com.

Smart Money columnist Melinda Fulmer writes about health and wealth for the Orange County Register

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